Native string functions are mapped to single byte functions, they do not work well with Unicode. The extentions iconv and mbstring offer some support for Unicode, while the Intl-extention offers full support. Intl is a wrapper for the facto de standard ICU library, see http://site.icu-project.org for detailed information that is not available on http://php.net/manual/en/book.intl.php . If you can not install the extention, have a look at an alternative implemention of Intl from the Symfony framework.

ICU offers full Internationalization of which Unicode is only a smaller part. You can do transcoding easily:

\\UConverter::transcode($sString, 'UTF-8', 'UTF-8');  // strip bad bytes against attacks

But, do not dismiss iconv just yet, consider:

\\iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', "Cliënt"); // output: "Client"